How Powerful is Social Media Anyway?

At the end of July, I participated in a panel at the GMA Immerse conference about how social media has progressed over the past year. I wanted to share some of the information that I talked about on the panel.

The following are statistics about how massive some of the most popular social media sites are.

Social media has some of the top ranked websites in the world. Here are the rankings of some of them:
1. Google
2. Facebook
3. YouTube
7. Wikipedia
8. Blogger
10. Twitter
(For those of you curious, MySpace has dropped down to #29.)

– The world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. (via Nielson)

– The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.” (via Nielson)

– In the last year (summer 2009 to summer 2010), the number of ACTIVE users on Facebook has doubled from 250 million to 500 million (via Facebook)

– 50% of those 500 million active users logon each day. (via Facebook)

– Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (via Twitter)

– 180 million unique visitors come to the Twitter site every month (via Huffington Post)

– YouTube has 2 billion views a DAY. That is almost double all 3 major TV networks combined. (via YouTube)

– Every minute, 24 hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube (via YouTube)

I’m not even going to touch on mobile statistics, which is also an area of rapid growth.

I think what all these stats say is that it’s extremely important to be online and utilizing the great tool that we call the Internet. You can be connecting to fans and using it to network, which will ultimately help the buzz about you spread. If 500 million people actively use Facebook, that’s 500 million you could potentially reach.

I hear a lot of people blame time as the reason they aren’t active on social networking sites. Sure, you can spend hours on there every day. However, just a few minutes (15-30) each day can really help with your social media presence.

You can check and respond to Facebook messages in a few minutes. As long as you have a phone with text messaging, you have the ability to Twitter from anywhere without a computer. YouTube is a little more time consuming, but when you look at the number of views per day, and take into consideration that 25% of all searches on Google are through YouTube (via ComScore), I think it’s well worth the time investment. You can invest in a little camera for a few hundred and it’s easy to upload those videos to YouTube.

For ideas on how to better your internet presence, you can read one of my older blogs.